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Biography

Dr. Richardson received his undergraduate education at the University of Virginia. He completed his medical and doctoral education in the MD/PhD program at the Medical College of Virginia, where his interest in adult neurogenesis led to an NIH National Research Service Award.

Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh in 2011, Dr. Richardson completed neurosurgical residency at the University of California San Francisco where he received specialized training in epilepsy neurosurgery, deep brain stimulation, and brain mapping during awake craniotomies. Additionally, he received an NIH National Research Service Award to study gene therapy delivery to the brain.

Dr. Richardson’s clinical specialization is comprehensive epilepsy surgery and deep brain stimulation for movement disorders. At UPMC, he created one of the first interventional-MRI DBS programs in the nation, and the only such program in Pennsylvania. Similarly, he was one of the first neurosurgeons in the United States to use robotics in both DBS and epilepsy surgery.

Dr. Richardson’s additional clinical expertise includes intraoperative mapping to preserve brain function, including language, in patients who are awake during epilepsy and tumor surgery. He also directs the Brain Modulation Lab, which anchors a multidisciplinary, human systems neuroscience research program.

Dr. Richardson is an active collaborator within the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (a joint program between Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh) and the University of Pittsburgh Brain Institute.

Board Certifications

American Board of Neurological Surgeons

Hospital Privileges

UPMC Children’s Hospital of PittsburghUPMC HamotUPMC Presbyterian

Professional Organization Membership:

American Association of Neurological Surgeons American Association of Stereotactic and Functional NeurosurgeryAmerican Epilepsy SocietyAmerican Society for Neural Transplantation and Repair Congress of Neurological Surgeons International Movement Disorders SocietySociety for Neuroscience

Education & Training

BA, University of Virginia, 1997MD/PhD, Medical College of Virginia, 2005Fellowship, University of California San Francisco Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2010Residency, University of California San Francisco Neurological Surgery, 2011

A complete list of Dr. Richardson's publications can be reviewed through the National Library of Medicine's publication database.

Research Activities

Dr. Richardson’s major research accomplishments for 2017-18 include discoveries in ongoing studies of intracranial neurophysiology in awake subjects undergoing DBS. Dr. Richardson and colleagues showed for the first time that information related to movement could be transferred between the individual subthalamic nucleus neurons and the cortex based on the firing rate pattern, in the absence of changes in the absolute firing rate (Lipski et al., Journal of Neurophysiology, 2017). This finding has important implications for understanding how the brain computes information within basal-ganglia thalamocortical circuits. They also published their initial findings from their BRAIN Initiative U01 project, showing that individual neurons in the subthalamic nucleus code for different aspects of speech production (Lipski et al., Journal of Neuroscience, 2018). This work is the first in a series of studies that will have implications for understanding how to eventually use DBS to improve speech in movement disorders.

Dr. Richardson and colleagues in Movement Disorders Neurology also published their initial cohort of STN DBS outcomes in Parkinson’s disease, comparing implantation via interventional-MRI guidance versus microelectrode-recording guidance. They demonstrated equivalent decreases in UPDRS scores and medication usage. Dr. Richardson’s expertise using the ClearPoint system for interventional-MRI guided functional neurosurgery was further validated by UPMC becoming only the second site in the world to complete over 100 cases with this system, including DBS, gene therapy and LITT.

In epilepsy-related work, Dr. Richardson and colleagues in the Brain Modulation Lab were awarded major funding through UPMC Enterprises and the Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance’s Center for Commercial Applications of Healthcare Data to develop BRAINStim (Biophysically Rational Analysis for Individualized Neural Stimulation), a platform for optimizing closed loop brain stimulation for epilepsy and other emerging applications.